Tuesday, 24 November 2015

Written by Suhas Savkoor

When you vMotion any VM in your vCenter environment, the vMotion fails immediately even before hitting the progress task in the task and event menu.

With 2008R2/Vista/Win7, this was a known issue and was fixed with Microsoft hotfix.
This can be found in this KB Article.

However, we might run into this 503 Service Unavailable issue on a 2012 machine as well.
When we run netstat -ano, we see a lot of Ports in Time_Wait state. The vCenter is not finding any ports to perform it's operation, hence causing the vMotion to fail.

There is a two step fix for this.

Step 1: Restart all the vCenter Services in an orderly fashion. The order is

1. VMware Directory Service

2. VMware Kdc Service

3. VMware Certificate Service

4. VMware Identity Management Service

5. VMware Secure Token Service

6. VMware vCenter Inventory Service

7. VMware vCenter Server

This will fix the issue, and you will be able to perform a vMotion. By restarting the services, we released all the ports, so once all the ports are released it will be available to establish a connection successfully.

However, a more permanent fix would be to Increase the JVM Heap Size for Management WebServices, SSO and Inventory Service.